


Seasons

by destinyofshipwreck



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Farm to Table Restaurant, F/M, bear with me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2019-08-06 19:31:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16393793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinyofshipwreck/pseuds/destinyofshipwreck
Summary: It's one in the afternoon, and if he were serious about it, he would have been early, but he arrives exactly on time, shouldering his way into the foyer off the kitchen through the heavy double doors from the alley, and bringing a flurry of snow along with him."Scott," he says, after he's pulled off his coat and dropped his backpack, sticking his hand out to shake hers.





	1. Chapter 1

It's a Tuesday, the slowest weeknight, and the weather is inclement even for November, howling wind and blowing snow, and there were only a handful of reservations to begin with, so it's not like Tessa couldn't organize the kitchen herself all evening, not like she hadn't effectively planned to anyway. But the stage she hasn't met has not yet arrived—he's from out of town; Kait had interviewed him and set the schedule—and she's irritated.

The restaurant is a little drinks-and-dinner Art Nouveau-looking place on the Danforth. It's outfitted with her sweat and blood, the space renoed on as tight of a shoestring as she and a pair of friends she'd known since the Culinary could manage. Kait's oldest brother is a journeyman electrician, who handled the wiring in trade for them catering his wedding. Ash and her cabinetmaker uncle built out half the kitchen and the restaurant's crowning glory, an enormous and delicate structure that's partly wine rack, partly apothecary cabinet, and the centerpiece of the dining room, behind the bar.

Tessa's thrift and willingness to put in fourteen-hour days compensated for her lack of hard skills or family members in the building trades, she and the other two agreed. The paint and the tiling were all her handiwork, her bruised knees and spells of dizziness from standing up too quickly after an hour hunched over the grout. And the Mucha prints in the washrooms, and the finish on the furniture they'd rescued from a bankrupting restaurant before it hit the dumpsters, the old white paint sanded off and the oak underneath rehabilitated with Danish oil.

And the menu is mostly hers, too. It's seasonal, which can be a real bitch in winter, but she's not a halfass, and between Ash's charcuterie and mixed drinks, Kait's insistence that they develop a robust fermentation practice, and the greens in a little hydroponic growing unit in what used to be a broom closet that she affords herself as her one indulgence in flexing the rules—it works. It's worked for four years, it worked well enough that the other two were willing to buy her out when she needed cash and had nowhere else to get it, and it still works, the three of them, even though she's not a partner anymore.

The three of them, and Joannie who's in before dawn six days a week to handle the pastry, and the stage, their fourth in the month since their old sous got tired of Toronto and went home to someplace in the Maritimes. No one has stuck so far.

It's one in the afternoon, and if he were serious about it, he would have been early, but he arrives exactly on time, shouldering his way into the foyer off the kitchen through the heavy double doors from the alley, and bringing a flurry of snow along with him.

"Scott," he says, after he's pulled off his coat and dropped his backpack, sticking his hand out to shake hers.

She sizes him up. Dark hair that would be shaggy if it were a little more overgrown. Dark shadow of stubble, an apologetic set to his mouth, dark eyes, broad shoulders, veins standing out on the back of his hand and his forearms.

"You're late," she says.

His fingertips are chilled from being outside, but his palm is warm against hers, and his grip is firm.

"I take your point," he says.

She leads him the few steps to the compact kitchen, hardly more than an alcove between the dining room and the bar, and tosses him a white coat. He's already stuffed his hair into a cap fished out of his backpack, embroidered with an unfamiliar logo. His knife roll is a patchwork of duct tape.

"Start with these," she says, handing him a plastic milk crate stacked high with a dozen cabbages. "And this," she says, pointing out the laminated prep list tacked to the wall. "Over here," she adds, gesturing to the workstation furthest from the stove, and he slips past her to wash his hands, and then into place.

He's not underfoot, although he looks like any moment he's about to be. There's something about his hangdog expression that's belied by his economy of movement, and it irks her.

All the same, he's methodical, his hands quick and precise. After half an hour of keeping an eye on him she's satisfied, and leaves him to shredding his cabbages, half of them to be pickled now and the other half to be braised closer to service. After the cabbages are crisp red-skinned potatoes, to be sliced transparently thin and brined; then kohlrabi; then eye-wateringly tart Granny Smiths.

He clears his throat. "This is, uh. A lot of pickles." Two hours had passed in industrious silence, she realizes.

"Yeah, pretty much nothing's allowed in winter that we couldn't have pulled out of a root cellar," she says.

"Go hard or go home," he says.

"Exactly," she says.

The evening is as quiet as the weather had promised, and it too passes in relative silence, the two of them only calling out their movements past each other in the narrow kitchen and orders up.

He has a deft hand with the minor challenge she sets him: attending to a carbon steel crepe pan and a bowl of her rye batter fermented overnight in the fridge, which is bitter against the acid tang of the afternoon's pickled cabbage that fills each crepe, and complicated by the char on the edges of the beef cheeks that are waiting in a water bath to be seared over an open flame on the gas range, sliced thinly across the grain, and fanned across them. 

She's watching him over the stove, watching the subtle muscle movement all the way to the shoulder as he flicks his wrist to fold a crepe into thirds and plate it in one movement, when, distracted, she closes her bare right hand around the untowelled edge of a sheet pan of pork shoulder she'd just retrieved from under the broiler.

The pain is white-hot.

"Jesus," she says.

Scott glances up and then he's right there, smoothly switching places with her so she's closest to the sink.

"Take a moment," he says in a low voice, unaccountably soothing, and reaches across her to flick on the faucet.

Trapped in the corner with her hand under cold running water, once she's caught her breath, she can watch how he works by himself with a more critical eye. He moves like an athlete, but she can't pinpoint what his sport might be—not a dancer, he doesn't have a dancer's grace, but he has an athlete's ease of balance. The way he favours his left shoulder looks borne of long habit. An ex-athlete sidelined by an injury, then.

There's a lull a few minutes later, during which he catches her staring, and she's overcome with embarrassment and has to look away, even though she has every reason to stare: it's an audition.

"How's your hand," he says.

"Good," she says. The pain has, in fact, receded, although the sensation of blisters filling with fluid is faintly nauseating.

His eyes flicker around her, looking for the first aid kit she'd neglected to point out to him earlier, she figures, but before she can reach for it, he's pulled a packet of sterile gauze and a fistful of nonstick bandages out of his backpack.

For a wild, humiliating moment, she thinks he's about to pat her hand dry and bandage it himself.

She only barely stops herself from proffering it to him. Instead he hands her the gauze and a pair of bandages, which she wraps awkwardly around her palm and the three fingers that caught the worst of the burn.

"Thanks," she says, then, remembering herself, adds, "Don't tell me what to do next time, though."

"Sorry,” he says. "First aid training, it just kicks in, you know."

Kait and Ash turn up for family meal even though it's their day off: their condo is just a couple of blocks away, and the food's no better at home. It's Scott's doing, with ingredients at Tessa's discretion, and it's breakfast in the middle of the night, Ash's intensely juniper-flavoured guanciale that he slices into thick lardons to render the fat out of, a remnant of pork shoulder pulled apart into ribbons, coarsely diced potatoes fried in the fat rendered from the jowl, wilted mustard greens, and poached duck eggs, their brilliant orange yolks pierced with a fork at the table to run over the hash as he doles it out.

"I vote to keep him," says Annette, the bartender.

Tessa washes it down with a bottle of brutally strong Belgian ale, then a second, and a third, still annoyed with herself for being distractable, and at Scott for being solicitous, and at herself, again, for relishing the attention.

He's deep in conversation with Ash, and Kait casts a smug look in Tessa's direction, but it must be clear from her expression that she's in a mood and would prefer to be left alone.

She's not ready to peel herself off the bar until after two.

It's not easy to find the right coat sleeve with her bandaged fist, and the first few attempts are a wash. She would have found it in the end, she's sure of it, but someone's muscular arm interposes itself and drapes the coat across her shoulders, and someone's steady hand guides hers through the armhole and directs it toward the cuff, and when she looks up, it's Scott.

"I'm going home," she says, shrugging his arm off and the rest of the coat on in one movement, only a little exaggeratedly, waving to the room at large. The front of house staff had left an hour ago and it's just Kait and Ash, clearing the table, paying her no heed.

"I see," says Scott. "Can I call you a cab?"

"It's close," she says. "Like, stumbling distance. I'm good."

"I'll walk with you," he says, still buttoning his own coat as he follows her out the door.

She's grateful for his company halfway down the block after she shakes a cigarette out of the pewter case she keeps in her coat pocket, nearly dropping it when it glances off the side of her bandaged hand, a little too tipsy to correct for her clumsy grip.

He scoops it up from where it's balanced precariously on the fold of her cuff.

"Good reflexes. You're hired," she says.

"Weaver already told me," he says, tucking the filter between her pursed lips. "But thanks for the vote of confidence. Here, you'll need help with this too." He pulls his own lighter out of his breast pocket and cups his hand around her mouth to protect it from the wind.

Her breath is hot, she knows, and surely he can feel it against his fingers through the thin leather of his gloves.

She draws deep and he pulls his hand away, snapping the lighter shut and putting it back in his pocket.

The walk to her house is half a cigarette long at her usual brisk pace, and Scott sits with her on the icy front step to finish it with her, taking the drags that she offers.

"I'm sorry I was curt with you earlier," she says, extinguishing the spent cigarette but not wanting him to leave.

"You mean when you burned your hand? That doesn't count," he says. "You were startled, it happens."

"It's just a weird time for me," she says. "I had a weird breakup a while ago and it's all been weird ever since. God, I don't know why I'm telling you this."

"How's your hand now," he says, changing the subject with a quirk of one eyebrow. "Let me see."

She does proffer her hand to him this time, and he takes it between both of his and holds it close to his face to see it in the dim porch light. The cold air had dulled the sensation, but stuffed into her coat pocket for warmth it had started to throb again.

The apologetic set of his mouth she'd noticed earlier is firmer now, when he's frowning in concentration, and she can't tear her eyes away, even when he looks up from her hand and catches her staring again.

"It'll be fine in a few days," she says, a little out of breath.

"Take care of it," he says, and he leans forward just enough to reach her lips with his own, and he kisses her, softly but not without certainty.

She smiles, without kissing him back.

"Thanks, but no. We just met," she says.

"I feel like sometimes a man's gotta try," he says, righting himself and running a hand through his hair.

"He does," she says. "I'm not actually your employer, though, so, could be more awkward."

"Really," he says, and she can tell he's genuinely surprised. "Wasn't the restaurant a partnership, I thought the three of you—"

She laughs, delighted. "How come you were surprised by the pickles if you did your homework. Yeah, it was us three, until I needed cash, and Kait and Ash were gracious enough to buy me out."

"What happened," he says.

"God," she says. "It's a whole saga. So I inherited this house, right, from my grandmother."

"I'm sorry for your loss," he says.

"Stop being nice," she says. "I took out a line of credit on it to pay off my student loan, but then I didn't know what to do next, and my friends were going to culinary school, so I went, too."

"Wait, what did you study before," he asks.

"No, I'm trying to tell you a story about plumbing," she says. "So we finished the program and we worked for a few years at different places, but after Kait and Ash got married they wanted their own place, and asked me if I would join them, and there was equity left in the house, so. Startup capital."

"Hence the partnership," he says.

"'Hence', you’re funny. Yes. But then a few months ago the water in the house was acting up, so I called someone, and turns out, it was an expensive problem to fix, but."

"No equity left in the house," he finishes for her.

The plumber she called had descended into the basement and emerged only a few minutes later, looking grim. The galvanized pipe was not original to the house, which was built before city water, but it was probably a hundred years old, and it was not only rusted almost all the way through, but in danger of disintegrating into the surrounding earth somewhere underneath the narrow backyard. The cheapest estimate she got to excavate the whole works to the edge of the lane and replace it with copper pipe was tens of thousands of dollars more than she had.

"They were nice about it," she adds, not that it sounds positive or optimistic coming out of her mouth. "And they'll let me buy back in, you know, if I ever get the chance."

"Rough," he says.

"Yeah, life sucks," she says. "But the water pressure is great now and it doesn't taste like rust anymore, and I just laid brick over the whole backyard so it's like a patio and if the pipes get wrecked again it's no big loss. You can come in and see if you want."

"I'm not gonna let you invite me in at two-thirty in the morning to show me your plumbing," he says, grinning. "As you said, we just met. Maybe another time."

Through December and January, Scott cultivates a routine of walking her home on the nights that they work together, insisting his own place is just a bit further east so it's not out of his way.

Kait is almost intolerably pleased with herself.

"How's Scott," she asks Tessa near the end of one slow evening.

"He was a good hire," says Tessa.

"And?" asks Kait, a gleam in her eye.

"He's smart and he works hard, he should think about going for his red seal," says Tessa.

"And what else," says Kait.

"That's all," says Tessa.

"Well, alright," says Kait.

"It really is," says Tessa.

"He just walks you home a lot, for a good hire who's smart and works hard and should go for his red seal," says Kait.

Tessa snorts. "And he's cute. But there's really nothing else to tell you."

"For now," says Kait.

"Would you let me live," says Tessa.

"I'm just saying, you don't need to be lonely if you don't want to be. You've got options."

"And you'll parade as many of them in front of me as you can, I know," says Tessa, and then they're interrupted by the chime of the front door and the gale from the street escorting in a raucous group for late dinner and drinks, and there's scarcely time to talk after that, and Kait doesn't bring it up again.


	2. Chapter 2

The transition from winter into spring is marked first not by the thaw but by the quality of the daylight that slopes into the kitchen through its single narrow window, the shadow from the knife rack cast onto the floor well into the early evening by the time March rolls around.  
  
Scott's at work with her at noon on the day that the restaurant takes delivery of the year's first fiddleheads and ramps from a greenhouse grower in Halton, who brings them to town in the back seat of a beat-up sedan and only takes payment in cash.  
  
"Sit," she says once she's hauled in the boxes, clearing a space from the countertop next to the range and pulling up a bar stool for him.  
  
"Tess," he says. "I gotta get through this before I can take a break." He's halfway into a milk crate of shallots, peeling and quartering them to braise with the winter's last turnips.  
  
"I'm your boss," she says. He rolls his eyes. "Look, let me monopolize your time now, and then I'll help you catch up if you need it later. Ten minutes. It's important."  
  
"Well, alright, then," he says, wiping off the blade of his knife on the front of his apron and setting it down.  
  
From the few glances she sneaks she can tell that he's watching her hands closely, and she's unusually cognizant of their movement and shape: the freckles that spill onto the backs of them from her forearms, the callouses on her palms, the short fingernails, the old burn scars.

He watches her, lips pursed and brow furrowed, as she drops a knob of butter into a skillet and sets it over a flame to brown, rubs the husks from the ferns, cleans and trims the ramps, rinses the lot in a colander, sautées them, fans them over a slice of baguette, scatters Maldon over top, and hands it to him with a flourish.  
  
"None for you?" he asks.  
  
"Nope," she says. "Ash gave me the first fiddleheads last spring, now it's your turn. Get me back next year."

He closes his eyes when he takes the first bite.

There's a thrill that comes with watching him without being watched back, and it's matched by the thrill of the gloss of browned butter on his lip before he wipes it off with the back of his hand; the thrill of the muscles working in his jaw and the movement of his throat when he swallows.

"Lovely," he says, opening his eyes, catching her gaze with a grin. "You don't have to bribe me first if you wanna stare at me, though."

"Don't flatter yourself," she says.

"I'd never," he says, grinning even wider. "But I'll go back to work now, if you don't mind."

He claps her on the shoulder on his way back to the shallots, and that thrill carries her through the rest of the evening, mood lighter than air.

When the spring thaw hits in earnest, so does construction: she finds out in April that the city is dealing with the rusted-out pipes in the lane when she comes home from work to a water shutoff notice posted that afternoon, and she’s awoken the following morning by the sounds of excavation and the smell of concrete dust filtering through her open bedroom window.

She showers at the gym; between it and the restaurant she can live without running water at home just like last summer, but the jackhammers at dawn can't be worked around.

Scott notices the dark circles under her eyes on the third day of three hours of sleep.

"What was the occasion?" he asks.

"Hm?" she says, only half-listening, her attention on the bucket of summer squash she's slicing paper-thin.

"Just looks like you must've partied pretty hard for a Wednesday," he says.

She glances up at him, then seeks out her face in the mirror that lets them see most of the bar from the kitchen, and he's right; she looks like hell.

"Oh," she says. "Remember I told you about my plumbing thing. The city's finally fixing the alley, and it's loud, is all. And early."

"How long's it been since you slept?" he says. "You can crash on my couch if you want, there's room."

She would never have taken him up on it except that he's right, she's exhausted. Kait and Ash would've put her up if she asked, but their apartment's a bachelor and it has always seemed rude to her to impose.

"And it's quiet," Scott adds.

"Okay, but no funny business," she says.

"No idea what you mean," he says.

The overcast afternoon develops into a drizzle as the evening wears on, and into sleet by the time they've closed the restaurant. Tessa, not having looked at the weather in the morning when she fled the jackhammering for the gym, is underdressed for it, but Scott pulls off his jacket and drapes it around her shoulders as soon as they step outside.

"I'm fine with just a sweater," he says. "And this is a little awkward, but."

She'd turned east toward her place and his, and he isn't following.

"I actually, uh, my place is the other way."

She stops, taken aback, then laughs aloud.

"Scott Moir, have you been lying to me for months just so you could walk me home," she says.

"I think I only actually lied to you the one time," he says, "But, I mean. I guess."

"You're a cad," she says, swatting him in the chest.

His place is closer to the restaurant than hers. He leads her there at a brisk clip, just a few blocks, but in only thin slacks and a t-shirt under the jacket and without gloves, she's chilled to the bone by the time they arrive. He unlocks the front door hurriedly and ushers her into the dim foyer, then up three flights of stairs and down a narrow hallway to the last apartment on the left.

The couch, it turns out, is an old loveseat upholstered in faded floral velveteen: even at five foot four she wouldn't be able to stretch out on it. He notices her nonplussed expression at once.  


"No, I'll take the couch, you take the bed," he says. "Don't argue. But let me make tea first at least, you're freezing."

The thermostat is on the wall next to the galley kitchen and he cranks it up a few notches on the way past it, setting off an echoing clatter of pipes in the wall.

His apartment is small and haphazardly furnished. The loveseat, a round teak coffee table, a TV on a makeshift shelf assembled from plywood and scavenged milk crates, a mismatched dresser and low vanity, a curtain drawn across the nook where the bed must be, a cramped bathroom partly visible through the half-open door, floor in worn parquet except for the discoloured aging vinyl in the kitchen, a card table next to the window, and two folding chairs, one of which she pulls out and settles into.

She watches him fill a little steel gooseneck kettle with tapwater and set it on a burner, then he takes from the mostly empty cupboard a couple of mason jars of dried flowers: chamomile, and what looks like battered chrysanthemums. When the water’s just off the boil he pours it over the flowers in an old brown earthenware teapot to steep, then decants it through a strainer into mismatched floral cups with chipped saucers. He pushes one across the table toward her.

The tea is pale gold, mellow and earthy, and between the radiator next to her feet, the cup between her hands, and the steam against her lips, she's not freezing anymore.

"I meant to thank you," she says finally, remembering that she hadn't. "For letting me sleep here. I should be good after tonight, it's just." A yawn overtakes her midsentence and she pauses, stretching her shoulders.

"Mm-hmm," says Scott. "There's clean towels on the shelf in the bathroom and you can borrow some sweats. Go shower off the kitchen grease and then I'm putting you to bed."

The sweatpants and hoodie he pulls from a drawer for her are emblazoned with the Queen's crest and VARSITY LACROSSE, faded with age. She’s tickled to see she was right about him.

When she emerges from the bathroom twenty minutes later, sweats cinched snug around her waist, he's pulling on a t-shirt and she catches a glimpse of his shoulder, which has a long-healed surgical scar across it.

"Rotator cuff?" she asks.

"Yeah," he says, and turns to face her. "A while ago though."

"Must've been bad to be an open repair. I thought you might be an athlete but couldn't tell what sport," she says, folding her clothes to stash in her handbag. "And your shoulder, you kind of favour it when you reach for things at work sometimes."

"Only aches when it's raining now," he says.

"That's why you quit lacrosse?" she asks.

"Well," he says. "That, and after the second time I broke my collarbone, I felt like I was out for too long and it didn't make sense to stay, so I dropped out."

"Of school?" she asks.

He grimaces. "I didn't have to, but it just felt weird? I didn't know what to do about quitting the one thing so I, uh, just quit everything. It was complicated. Anyway, what were you doing scoping out my biomechanics at work, the shoulder is a weird thing to notice."

Clothes tucked away, she sits on the loveseat, not quite ready to sleep, and he joins her there, as far away as it allows, which is less than her arm's length.

"I did dance at York," she says. "Still like spotting other athletes in the wild. I was gonna join a company after I graduated, but these had other ideas."

Feet propped up on the coffee table, she leans over to tug up the cuffs of his sweatpants, revealing a narrow scar up each shin.

"Compartment syndrome," she says, in answer to his raised eyebrow. "Physio didn't help, surgery didn't help enough, so I work in restaurants now."

"Another profession known for being easy on the legs," he says.

"Sure, but it's different," she says. "No problems yet, anyway."

Scott looks like he wants to reach out for her, but he only folds his hands together in his lap.

"You're very graceful at work," he says. "Not that I was paying attention, it just stands out. I thought you might've danced."

"Still do at parties," she says idly.

Her hair is still pinned into its chignon from work, but the tendrils that escaped at the nape of her neck are damp from the shower and cooling quickly, which she notices with a shiver.  
  
"Do you mind if—" she begins, shifting her weight toward him, at the same moment that he makes to stand, apologizing, "Oh, sorry, I'll find you a blanket," and their knees collide in the middle of the sagging cushion, the bottom of her thigh landing square on a spring that’s about to rip through the worn upholstery, and she leaps up with a yelp, landing half on top of him.  
  
"No funny business, huh," he says.  
  
"I was gonna say, do you mind if I lean against you, 'cause you're warm," she says. "But this works too."  
  
It's been months since she was this close to anyone, and she's so overwhelmed by it that she can feel the burn of her flush down past her collarbones. He shifts to wrap an arm around her, and must be able to feel her breath quicken.  
  
She moves further into his lap, so they're nearly cheek to cheek.  
  
"How about this," he asks, and kisses her softly, again.  
  
This time she does part her lips for him, but he's slow to deepen the kiss, waiting for her to take the lead, which she does with one hand on the back of his neck and the other knotted into his hair, tugging it until he gasps into her mouth.  
  
She swings a leg over his to sit astride him, forgetting about the spring in the loveseat until it digs sharply into her knee.  
  
"Bed," she says.  
  
"If you'd like," he says, and she kisses him again, which seems to be enough of an answer.  
  
He lifts her easily, even before she can wrap her legs around his waist to support herself in his grip, both of his hands on her ass, without breaking the kiss.  
  
He shucks off his clothes after setting her on the edge of the bed. There's another old surgical scar below his right knee, which looks like it would have been an ACL repair. His chest hair is sparse but thickens down his abdomen, and his cock—  
  
"I wanna touch you," she says.

He slides his hands under the sweatshirt before he lets her, easing it over her head without catching the neckband on her hair, then settling himself onto the bed next to her, so she can arrange herself however she'd like. A little more courteous than he needs to be, she thinks.

He hisses through his teeth when she closes her hand lightly around his cock, and closes his eyes when she drags her the tip of her thumb slowly up its length, and whimpers when she smears the bead of precome across the head of it, and gasps when she presses against the frenulum.

"You're gonna kill me like that," he says. "I want you, if you—"

"Yes," she says. He fishes a condom out of the drawer in the nightstand while she pulls off the sweatpants, less delicately than he did, leaving them in a heap at the foot of the bed, and then he's next to her again.

He's so soft: he teases her with his fingertips, dipping into her cunt only to the first knuckle and then pulling away again, until she's dripping wet and shoving her hips at him, pulling her hand away every time she reaches for his cock again.

He's so tender: when she can't help herself anymore, cursing at him for not fucking her, when she climbs astride him again, he bites his lip as she sinks onto him, waiting for her to find her own angle and depth, an inch at a time, stroking her abdomen and the small of her back so lightly she can hardly stand it, only pushing back into her when she begs him.

By accident she glimpses herself in the cracked mirror on the vanity halfway across the room, past the open curtain. Their bodies make an arresting tableau, sharply lit by the bedside lamp; her skin reddening under the grip of his fingers now firm on her shoulders, her hair half-loose now, her face glowing with sweat.

He comes inside her, watching her watch herself, and she clambers off him, resting her head on his shoulder, while they both catch their breath.

"I don't know if this should happen again," she says, and his fingertips, tracing a light zigzagging path across her ribs, slow to a stop there.

"Like, again tonight, or again another day," he says. "Not to be crass, but—"  
  
She laughs, and his expression softens, reassured. "Another day, I mean. I really can't date anyone right now, I don't want to give you the wrong impression."  
  
"What impression would that be," he says. "That you know what you want? Because that's the impression you're giving me, nothing else."  
  
His hand is in motion again, edging toward her breast.  
  
"No, that's the right one," she says, and takes his hand in her own, bringing it to her mouth, closing her lips around his index and middle fingers, then withdrawing them and moving the hand between her own legs, guiding his fingers into her, satisfied by his sharp intake of breath.  
  
He props himself up on his elbow to watch her face while he fucks her, only almost looking away when she lowers her own hand to her clit, stroking herself in the rhythm he set for her. He covers her mouth with his when she's about to come, and kisses her like she imagines he'd kiss her cunt if he tasted her, not pulling away from her until she's spent, shuddering.  
  
"Neighbours," he says, once she's recovered. "The walls are pretty thin."  
  
The clock on the wall reads 5:45, which, she supposes, is a bit early for noise.  
  
"I'm gonna shower, unless you want one first?" he says.  
  
"Mm," she says, which he correctly interprets as a negative, and he kisses her on the forehead and pulls the duvet over her, and she's so fast asleep so quickly that she doesn't notice his return to bed.  
  
When she does wake up, the wall clock reads noon and he's already left for work. On the counter is a Chemex with a filter in place and ground coffee measured into it, which she can't be bothered to use; a half-empty box of blueberry Pop-Tarts; and a note on an index card that says, "Please lock deadbolt when you leave (spare key under mat) xx S."  
  
She avails herself of a Pop-Tart, which is stale; digs through the kitchen drawer of odds and ends until she locates a pen; then scribbles another note on the reverse of the index card, "Too lazy for coffee but thanks. See you at work Tues. T."

One Saturday night at the beginning of May, Tessa’s working with Kait and Scott's off, but he breezes in at the end of the night for family dinner anyway: it's Kait's turn, and it's a frittata full of the limp dregs of the night’s pea shoots and nasturtiums, and a stale baguette split lengthwise in half and grilled in compound butter with garlic scapes and bone marrow.  
  
"I'll walk you home," he says, after Kait's packed up and left.  
  
"I, uh," she says, looking away. "I'm gonna clean up here. You go ahead. Thanks, though."

"I'll help, then," he says. He takes the skillet from her hands, and turns on his heel to the kitchen.  
  
She wipes down the bar and the tabletops and rearranges the front of house for tomorrow while he works in the dish pit, and it's done sooner than she would've liked.  
  
"Ready?" he asks.  
  
"I didn't get a chance to finish some prep for tomorrow and I don't wanna leave it for Kait to do. You go, don't wait."

"Nah," he says. "What's left?"  
  
"Oh," she says. "It's fava beans, they need shelling and pickling."

"It's quicker if I stay," he says.

He isn't wrong, and she supposes she isn't ungrateful for the help, even though she'd hoped to be alone.

"So," he says after they've made a respectable amount of headway. "Why don't you want to go home? Do you need a place to stay?"

"What? No," she says. "Why'd you think that, did Ash tell you something?"  
  
"No, she's a brick wall about you," he says. "It's just strange for you to make up an excuse to stay at work in the middle of the night when you have tomorrow off, is all, so, you know, I figured."

She sighs, and he glances at her but doesn't say anything, and it's the courtesy of his silence that moves her to tell him.  
  
"My ex was supposed to pick up his stuff today," she says. "From my house. There wasn't a lot and it was just in boxes in the hall and it was there for months, so it's not like anything'a different, but."  
  
They're standing elbow to elbow. He's taller than her, but not by much, his shoulder the right height to lean her cheek against.  
  
She chances it.  
  
He inhales slowly, but doesn't step back or shrug her off.  
  
After a long moment he turns his head toward her, and she can feel his breath in her hair.  
  
"I get it," he says, then: "Do you need a locksmith? I know a guy, you can get the locks changed tonight if that'll help you feel like it's over."  
  
He's too practical: it breaks the spell, and his concern suddenly feels suffocating.  
  
"Thanks, but it's fine," she says, stepping away so she's just outside arm's reach. "He said he'd drop his key through the mail slot, that's over enough for me."  
  
It's another hour before the shucked beans are blanched and shelled and tucked into jars of oil in the fridge, with no further logistical suggestions from Scott and no recourse for continuing to dawdle. Joannie, who rolls in at half-past four, would only be irritated by them if they're still in the kitchen, in her way.  
  
"I can walk you home, if you want," he says. "Or, I mean, it's four, there's that all-night diner on the way, we could get breakfast."  
  
"You can walk me home, but I'm dead on my feet, I'd fall asleep over breakfast," she says.

"Another time," he says.  
  
He walks closer to her than he needs to on the empty sidewalk, close enough to occasionally bump her hip with his own. When she unlocks the front door Ryan's house key on an otherwise empty key ring is sitting on the sisal mat in the foyer, and there's no reason for Scott to come inside, so she bids him goodnight, although she can't stop herself from watching him through the window until he turns a corner from her street back onto the avenue and disappears from her line of sight.


	3. Chapter 3

"Any plans for the long weekend?" Scott asks on a Wednesday, on his way through the door from the alley shortly after three. She's carving last night's porchetta, the size of her forearm, into inch-thick slabs.

"No, no plans, I'm here on the Friday and the Saturday, you know that, and after that I guess I'll garden, or something. Why do you ask?"

"I can rearrange my shifts with Ash if you want the Saturday," he says.

"Why do you ask," she says again.

"And," he adds, "If you want a change of scenery, if you want a place to get away to, I know a good one, it's a three-hour drive, and no one will be there even though it's May long, and it's yours if you want it."

"What's wrong with it," she says.

"Nothing, I just never saw you take a vacation, is all," he says.

"I'd take one if I wanted one," she says.

"Oh well," he says. "Anyway, I brought music today. I made us a playlist."

"Really," she says. "Too good for Radio 2?"

The radio is playing an afternoon-long feature on Sibelius, every symphony in order intermingled with some tone poems she'd never heard before. Scott had interrupted one about an ancient forest spirit, full of dissonance and uncomfortable silences.

"No one's too good for Sibelius," he says. "The way you keep switching to electropop right before close is a little abrupt though, I thought we could try some kind of transition."

"Why do you know about music," she says.

"More than meets the eye," he says, tone robotic; then adds: "That's an intimate question for the workplace, you're going to have to befriend me if you want the goods. Leave this on, though."

"You sure? It's, uh, not melodic."

"Don't you like it when music sounds like it's indifferent to your enjoyment of it," he says. "That's what I'm really here for."

"Explains why we get along so well," she says.

"You understand me, Tess," he says.

"Chef," she says. "We're in the kitchen, you gotta call me chef. Go dig the radishes out of the coals." They were Kait's idea to serve alongside the porchetta, which had also tasted the coals overnight; confited in lard, then wrapped in foil and roasted.

"Yes, chef," he says.

"Good boy," she says, turning away, but she's certain he saw her grin.

The Sibelius program closes out with a recording of Valse Triste— "Dance with me," Scott says, noticing how she responds to the waltz almost automatically with a swing of the hip and an unusually expressive angle of elbow and flick of the wrist when she reaches across the counter; "Don't start any fires," she says, gesturing toward the three skillets on the range behind him. During a momentary lull a few minutes later he plugs his phone into the tinny speaker perched on the corner shelf that's too awkward to use for storage.

She's slow to realize over the next half-hour that it's a playlist comprised only of waltzes, only catching on when Leonard Cohen sings one specifically by name.

"This one's a little much for work, isn't it, a little—"

"—a little sultry? No, it's a classic," says Scott.

And then there are more, some she'd heard before and some she hadn't; a grimy recording heavy on distortion with an alternately growled and screamed refrain that she thinks she recognizes from student radio years ago; a gospel one with a howled chorus about love in vain that makes her eyes water.

She's still humming it to herself after close, as she assembles a tart for family meal with the oddments of porchetta left over from service and the wilted arugula and radishes that remained at the end of the evening, and half a hemisphere of soft cheese from Québec nearing the end of its useful tenure in the fridge, the size of her fist, the sprig of rosemary pressed into its crown browning with age; and again on the walk back to her house at two in the morning. Scott, who had insisted on walking her home, watches in bemusement, but hums in harmony with her all the same.

"You liked it," he says. "I'll make more playlists, then, we were really efficient today."

"No, bring that one back," she says, shuffling her feet to avert the twirl she can feel building from her toes.

It would be generous to call "gardening" the work of hauling pots out of the back of the house onto the bricked-over yard, she thinks wryly the morning of the holiday Monday, as she arranges them in a row along the length of the yard's narrow sliver of full sunlight.

The bricks had been Ryan's suggestion, clean and practical. The stack of paving stones next to the door, against which she stubs a toe on her way past with an earthenware pot of heliotropes, were to become the makeshift patio he had never assembled for her.

The raised beds needed to be torn out to effect the pipe repair, she knew, and the lot was so narrow, he had reminded her, that there would have been nothing else left to garden in any event. It was simpler, she knows, but the annuals she'd bought from a Lowe's tent and saved for the long weekend in the ad hoc sunroom she'd cordoned off from the kitchen looked forlorn in their pots.

Even weeks after the last of the boxes were gone from her front hall, the emptiness of the house is somehow still his, like she's still moved to defer to his preferences.

"I'm not changing the fucking lock," she says out loud to the master bedroom.

Her grandmother's curtains and their valance are still in the linen closet: long and billowing with drawn-thread trim painstakingly worked by hand. She tugs the putty-coloured linen curtains off the rod—Ryan's years-ago request, to block out the afternoon's direct sunlight—and tosses them in a heap in the corner, rethinks it, folds them; hangs the lace where they were.

Almost immediately the room is perceptibly warmer, but the light is warmer too, and she passes the afternoon sprawled on top of the duvet with a book, bare legs shade-dappled in the shadows cast by the opaque lines of the embroidery.

By the end of the week the weather turns, and she wakes at noon on Friday to a thick layer of frost between the window and the curtain, and the heliotropes are a lost cause.

Scott asks her again about the long weekend in July, both of them sitting on the floor with crates of stone fruit between them, sorting them by ripeness for preserves and salads and tarts, or to macerate in vinegar for shrubs for the bar if they're too far gone.

"I told you I take vacations when I need them, and right now I don't," she says. "What's this place you have that nobody uses?"

"It's in the county," he says. "It's my brothers' and mine, it's just too bad that nobody's been out there for longer than a day or two all year."

"In the county," she says. "On the lake?"

"Kind of," he says. "Across the street from the lake, I guess. There's a beach up the road, a real one, sand dunes and everything."

"Is it less humid there than here," she says. The kitchen is already so sweltering that she'd strongly considered adjourning the fruit-sorting exercise to the walk-in freezer, even knowing it'll only get worse once the range and the oven are on, but she's too proud to suggest it.

"Not really," says Scott. "Actually it's awful there compared to here. There's peaches, but nobody will drop them off at your back door in old milk crates, you have to go out and pick them yourself, like some kind of, I dunno, peasant or something."

"Thanks," she says, wiping sweat from her brow and the bridge of her nose. "Any excuse to count my blessings."

"Here," says Scott. "This one's too ripe, it won't last until tomorrow. You have to eat it right now, there's no other choice."

"Well, if someone must," she says.

He hands it to her carefully, over the crate between them, and he's right; it's so soft it nearly disintegrates in her hand when she turns it over, and it's so yielding to her teeth that it surprises her, only the peel offering any resistance at all.

He reaches over the crate again and with his fingertips brushes the juice clinging to her chin to her mouth, slipping his fingers between her lips for a split second, and she closes her eyes.

"God," he says, and withdraws his hand. "I'm so sorry, whatever that was, I didn't—"

"It was nothing," she says. "You were right, it was too ripe to last 'til tomorrow, but we're gonna run out of afternoon if we waste any more time, there's still plums to do after this."

"Right," he says. "Sorry. Chef."

She hates it that Ryan was right about anything, but through July the master bedroom is so hot by midday without blackout curtains that it gives her curious feverish dreams and wakes her early, the bedsheets soaked with sweat. Resolutely she takes a drill to the studs on either side of the picture window to install a vinyl shade behind the lace curtain, the mount hidden underneath the valance.

One of the venues she had canvassed a year ago for a fall wedding in Muskoka mails her what feels like a brochure in a thick laid envelope, which she shoves to the bottom of the blue bin unopened; but the night after its arrival she lays awake for hours, unable to turn her thoughts from it, and she retrieves it at five in the morning, before the recycling is picked up, and shoves it instead in the bottom of her handbag, takes it to work with her that afternoon, and watches it crumple and disintegrate into ashes on the smouldering coal fire, among the radishes and the pork bellies tied into rolls.

In early August the restaurant is inundated with tomatoes of every variety. Tessa had suggested to Kait, who agreed, that the seasonality of the winter menu would not be compromised by the inclusion of preserves from the summer, provided they put them up themselves, and the first two weeks of the month are days of overtime spent roasting tomatoes and dehydrating them to reserve in oil, or reducing them into jams thick with vinegar.

"I want you to come to the county with me for the Labour Day weekend," says Scott over a jam crock in the third week. "It's apple season. Cider season."

"When have you known me to take a vacation," she says.

"Restaurant's closed on the Sunday and the Monday, we're both off on the Saturday because we're on this weekend, I'm renting a car, we're doing it," he says. "You need a change of scenery."

"Looking that glum, huh," she says.

"It's a real cottage with a guest bedroom," he says. "It was my dad's, my brothers and I have been fixing it up."

"Well, if there's a reno to critique," she says.

"Pack a bag," he says. "I'll pick you up from your place on Friday at two."

The bag-packing is a more complicated proposition than Tessa had anticipated. If she'd ever had a weekend bag before, it had long since been decluttered from the storage space under the stairs in the kitchen; a backpack seems too casual, a suitcase too presumptuous. And, not having tested it before, she had been unaware that a casual weekend at a lakeside cottage among friends was an area in which her wardrobe was sorely deficient. Work clothes are too affected; anything more casual that wasn't for the gym is heavily paint-spattered. No shoes without closed toes.

_No one needs to know_ , she thinks, and spends the morning that Friday not sleeping off the late night but at the Eaton Centre looking at sundresses and sandals and some kind of bag will fit them, settling on an oversized nylon Ted Baker tote that she thinks strikes the right balance of practicality and cognizance of style.

She's home by half-past one to clip the tags off the summer clothes and pace nervously around the living room, thinking of the restaurant without her for three days in a row, the ashes of the wedding brochure, the unchanged lock on the front door, the blackout curtains folded on the bottom shelf of the linen closet, the pots of dead annuals still in their sunny row behind the house.

Scott arrives exactly on time.


End file.
